Estate Planning Specialist Reviews Every UK Lasting Power of Attorney Route, From Doing It Yourself to £500-a-Document Solicitors, and Reveals What She'd Actually Recommend

By Helen Ashworth •Estate Planning •Last updated 14 May 2026 •👁 8,742 •📖 4 min •★★★★★

My name is Helen Ashworth. For over 32 years I worked in probate and estate planning, much of it inside high-street law firms, preparing Lasting Powers of Attorney.

And I've never been more frustrated with this system.

Every week I hear about people in their late sixties, seventies and eighties who are stuck in the same impossible situation.

For decades there have only ever been two real options, and both of them are bad ones.

You can do it yourself. The form is free to download from the government. But it's a minefield, and one wrong tick gets the whole thing rejected.

Or you can pay a high-street solicitor, who'll want £350 to £500 a document, and well over £1,400 for a couple's full set, to fill in that exact same free form for you.

A trap on one side, or a small fortune on the other. So most people end up doing nothing.

They put it off. They tell themselves they'll sort it next year. They tell themselves their husband or wife could simply step in.

But they couldn't. I watched it for thirty-two years. A stroke, a fall, a diagnosis, and the wife of forty years is suddenly locked out of the joint account. The bank freezes everything. The family can't pay the carers. And a judge they've never met decides who controls the money, because the one document that would have stopped it was never signed in time.

Twenty minutes and £92 would have prevented it. That is what kept me up at night for three decades.

So when I retired, I decided to do something about it. I reviewed every Lasting Power of Attorney route in the country, tested on my own clients, over six months.

Here's what I found.

Doing it yourself, direct to the Office of the Public Guardian

First, the one fee nobody escapes: it costs £92 a document to register an LPA with the government. That's the same £92 whether you do it yourself, use a solicitor, or use anyone else. It's a government fee, not a service charge. Keep that number in your head, because it matters in a moment.

The form itself is free to download from gov.uk. But it was written by lawyers, for lawyers. Eighteen pages, plus another twenty-three of guidance notes.

There are eight things on it that look obvious to me after 32 years and aren't obvious to anybody else: the signing order, the certificate provider rules, the witness rules, the attorney clauses, the "jointly" versus "jointly and severally" trap, the dates, the restrictions box, and the name matching against your ID.

I know how many of these end up rejected and shoved in a drawer.

In 2024, the Office of the Public Guardian rejected 133,760 LPA applications. That's 9% of every form submitted that year. Roughly a third, about 44,000 people, got the signing order wrong. Two ticks out of sequence, on a form that costs £92 to get wrong.

And the rejection letter takes around four months to arrive. Four months in which capacity can go. If it does, the form can never be corrected, and the family is left at the mercy of the Court of Protection. Thousands in fees. Months of waiting.

The DIY route is free until it isn't.

High-street solicitors

Typical price in 2024: £350 to £500 a document. Co-op Legal charge £495.

It adds up fast. A couple who want the full set, both document types each, four documents in all, are quoted £1,400 or more. That's the number that makes people shut the drawer and put it off another year.

The work is good. I won't pretend otherwise. The firms I worked in were good ones.

But after 32 years I can tell you exactly what you're paying for. The form is the OPG's form, the same free one on gov.uk. Nobody drafts a private version; there isn't one. The hour it takes to check it properly costs the firm about £40 in a junior's wages.

The rest of it pays for the building on the high street. The reception. The secretary. The professional indemnity insurance. The partner's car park.

An LPA is not a £500 legal problem. It's a 20-minute form that someone needs to fill in carefully and check properly. The whole high-street model is built on making a simple thing feel frightening enough that you'll pay a partner's rate to do it for you.

It doesn't make your LPA one bit more legally valid. It just costs more.

The gap nobody filled

This is the part that genuinely makes me angry, looking back.

For thirty-two years I watched ordinary people forced to choose between a free form they couldn't safely complete and a bill for hundreds of pounds they couldn't justify. And the maddening thing is that the work in the middle, the bit that actually matters, is small.

It's one careful hour. Someone who knows the form sitting down, checking the certificate provider qualifies, checking the witnesses aren't disqualified, checking the signing order is right, before it ever goes near the government.

That one hour is the difference between an LPA that registers first time and one of the 133,760 that get rejected. It is the entire value a £500 solicitor adds. And for decades, nobody offered just that hour, on its own, at a sensible price. You either bought the whole expensive package, or you got nothing and took your chances.

So the obvious question is: why did nobody simply do the checking, properly, for a fair price?

As it turns out, somebody finally has.

Keystone Estate Planning: £69 a document, free Will included

This is the one that surprised me.

When I first heard there was a service doing exactly the checking I'd just described, for £69 a document, I was sceptical. After 32 years you assume anything that cheap must be cutting the corner that matters. So I did what I'd do with any service: I opened up their process and put it through three of my own cases.

They use the same official forms I worked with for years, the LP1F for property and financial affairs and the LP1H for health and welfare. The exact documents the OPG issues.

Let me be blunt, because the scepticism is the thing that stops people. The document Keystone produces is not a cheaper version of the solicitor's document. It is the same document. The same official OPG form, registered the same way, with the same legal standing. There is no "budget LPA" and "premium LPA". There is one legal document, and you are simply choosing whether to pay a partner's hourly rate to fill it in.

What you're paying Keystone for is the checking. Before anything goes to the OPG, an actual person reads your answers, confirms the certificate provider qualifies, the witnesses aren't disqualified, the signing order is right, and only submits when they're satisfied it'll register first time. The same hour of careful checking a firm bills you a partner's rate for.

I tested three cases: a recently-widowed neighbour, my own mother, and a friend whose previous LPA had already been rejected once. All three came back from the OPG registered on the first submission.

I rang their support line, half-expecting a call-centre script. Instead I got a real person, here in the UK, who knew the LP1F inside out. After 32 years I can tell when someone actually understands this paperwork. They did.

Then there's the cost. £69 a document, and every Power of Attorney comes with a free Will included, normally £59. The second document most people put off for another decade, thrown in for nothing.

And you don't pay a penny to begin. You start the form free, answer the questions in your own time, and only pay at the very end, once you've been all the way through and seen exactly what you're getting. If it's not for you, you've lost nothing but a few minutes.

I looked into who's behind it. It was founded by a woman called Caitlin, after her parents were quoted over £1,400 by a solicitor for their Powers of Attorney. Same official forms. Same legal result. She knew there had to be a simpler, cheaper way. So she built one.

Three cases, all registered first time. They did the same careful work I watched done in law firms for 32 years, for a fraction of what those firms charged.

The feedback was the same, over and over: "Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner?"

What I hear from real people

My recommendation

After 32 years preparing LPAs, here's what I tell everyone who asks.

If you have a legal background and you're genuinely confident about all eight rejection categories, the DIY route is fine. It's £92 a document and the form is free. Just be honest about the failure rate. Nine in every hundred forms get rejected.

If money is no object and you want a meeting in a partner's office, the high-street solicitor route is fine. You're paying for the building more than the legal work, but the work will be done properly.

But if you're like most people I worked with, who can't justify hundreds a document in solicitor fees, can't afford to lose £92 to a signing-order error, and can't bear the thought of leaving their family at the Court of Protection, start with Keystone.

Here's the honest way to look at it. Everyone pays the government the same £92 a document to register. The only real choice is what you pay on top of that to get it done properly:

Look at that last line again. The Will they include is worth £59. So for getting a professional to check your forms before they're submitted, the thing that stops you losing your £92 to a rejection, you're really paying about £10. And you can start for free and only pay at the end.

I did it for my own mother. She's 84, stubborn as they come. She tried the DIY route in 2019, got rejected, and gave up. She did it through Keystone in 2023, and both LPAs registered in eleven weeks.

"Should've done it this way the first time," she told me last month.